The other day it dawned on me that I could use the cheap kit lens from the D5300, the ubiquitous 18-55mm on my various Nikon 1 cameras adapted with the FT1.  I’ve obviously used all of my F mount lenses on this thing for testing and goofing off purposes many times in the past but never stuck with it because of the weight and unbalanced nature of any of those combos.  They can be a good tool in some situations but nothing you’d want to carry around all day since the V1 doesn’t really have a grip.  This combo though is really nice and light.  Very sharp images too and the combo results in something like a 50-150mm field of view lens with VR!

Before we get to that combo though here are photos around the neighborhood Publix with the V1 and 24-70mm 2.8.  A much nicer and more expensive FF lens when compared to the humble kit lens.  Just to show that the shallow depth of field and lens characteristics still retains somewhat in the crazy 2.7X crop of the 1″ sensor.

It’s again, very unwieldy but I thought this might be a nice 70-200 “equivalent” lens that would be good for outdoor sports and other events.  The V1 can shoot silently around 10fps with frames to spare in the buffer, so for say outdoor soccer where you don’t want to wear out a DSLR shutter, this combo might be the better option.

So to my eye the above photos are pretty much in the neighborhood and knocking on the door of APS-C Nikon cameras like a D40, D50, D200 etc.

Now with those “higher quality” shots out of the way, here are the pictures from the actual combo and title of this blog post.  Let’s see if the images have their own charm about them.

 

(They are making a new park and playground in Suwanee.  Hopefully it will have photogenic corners and trees.)

So in my opinion this combo is not that bad!  I like the flaring on this lens and the resolving power of it is plenty for the 1″ sensor.  Again, if you give any Nikon camera great shooting conditions it will give you the RAW file that can be edit to your heart’s content.  For 20 plus years now the .nef’s have always been about great usable data. 

The V1/J1 + 18-55mm combo won’t get the subject background separation compared to putting a 2.8 lens on it, but the awesome advantage is the weight.  Since almost all the Nikon 1 10-30 native kit lenses are broken or in the process of losing that one last hit point, this actually is a cool workaround to having a zoom when combined with another A tier combo: the J1 and 10mm!  I could see covering a future outdoor festival with just those two cameras.